About Myself

Martha Shirk has been a program consultant to the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowship since August 2006. She spent 23 years as a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where she covered social welfare and public health issues. Over the years, her investigative pieces for the Post-Dispatch were credited with changing Missouri laws or regulations on day care centers, juvenile justice practices, access to maternal and child health services, child death investigations and child support collections. Since 1996, she has lived in Palo Alto, where she works as a free-lance writer and communication consultant. Ms. Shirk is the co-author of three books: "Lives on the Line: American Families and the Struggle to Make Ends Meet;" "Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs: How Eleven Women Escaped Poverty and Became Their Own Bosses," and "On Their Own:What Happens to Kids When They Age Out of the Foster Care System." "On Their Own" won the 2005 Pro Humanitate Book Award, given annually by the North American Resource Center for Child Welfare to honor the best child welfare book published in the previous year. In 2004, Ms. Shirk was a fellow at the Knight-CDC Journalism Boot Camp. She has also participated in fellowships offered by the Center for International Journalists, the Knight International Fellowship, the Casey Center for Reporting on Children and Families and the Knight Center for Specialized Reporting. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Swarthmore College and a master’s degree in urban studies from the University of Chicago.